I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.
This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.
I once abused an SMTP relay (my own) by emailing Novell a 400+ MB memory dump. Their FTP site kept timing out.
After all that, and them swearing they had to have it, the OS team said “Nope, we’re not going to look at it”. Guess how I feel about Novell after that?
This was in the mid-90’s.
Well, at least they were being on-brand. 😅